Love, nostalgia, time that passes inexorably, making urgent questions about the self, about personal goals, about relationships, become, in the novel by the author from Messina Roberto Fazio “The miracle of Colapesce” (Bonfirraro Editore), insights into existential analysis, balanced between dream and reality, in which the dream, as a dream world, with its ghosts, sometimes seems to characterize reality itself.
At the center, the story of two people who love each other, Roberto and Ivanain a phase of life in which the couple’s bond itself seems to falter, under the weight of the individual’s anxieties, which at times overwhelm love itself. He, already thirty years old, left without a job, is part of that generation that has been denied a future, with the goals they dreamed of perhaps definitively vanished, leaving room for a strong sense of frustration; she deals with a devastating pain and pressing abandonment anxieties.
Roberto’s trip to Sicily, his homeland, will become an opportunity to reconnect with his most authentic self and perhaps give an answer to the many doubts of his life, to that denied future. Sicily, a land loved in an absolute and visceral way, in its many contradictions, attracts and repels, binds inextricably while it proposes the elsewhere, leaving its children entangled in the dilemma between attachment and escape, suspended between nostalgia and future, never fully satisfied. That perfect triangle, surrounded by a boundless sea that makes you imagine the worlds beyond the Strait, is the place of the heart that Roberto observes from the balcony of the house where he was born, while his mind gets lost in a horizon without walls and barriers, allowing thoughts to flow freely. Thus, cradled by his mother’s attention and by his boundless sea, he abandons himself to memories and tries to read the present in a new way, free from the urgencies of everyday life in a city in the North that at times almost suffocates him. The journey and the temporary separation from the loved one thus become a precious opportunity to reflect on the self, on love, on the sense of responsibility towards others, on the will to defend the relationship with Ivana and preserve it, despite personal wounds, and above all else.
The myth of Colapescea humble fisherman who prefers to remain in the depths of the sea to support one of the three columns on which Sicily rests, seems to be emblematic in this sense. He teaches that if you truly love you are willing to make any sacrifice. Colapesce agrees to resurface every hundred years to allow his beloved land not to sink into the abyss. Because true love is altruistic: it overcomes pain, suffering, abandonment and always supports you.